Crowd control

Japanese are masters of crowd control. They process people like McDonalds processes hamburgers.

Er, that analogy didn't work well. Let's try it again.

They process people like fish swim. Really well.

Most people know about the incredibly efficient trains. But do you know about their annual health check-up? This is my third year in a row for my 健康診断。Every company has to provide a comprehensive preventive health check up for their employees each year. And clinics are set up to deal with large numbers of people. So it works like this.

You get your paperwork months in advance. On the day of your visit you have to collect your own stool and urine sample. Yuck. You bring that (talk about carrying dangerous weapons on the subway..) to the office and give it to them when you check in. Then you change into pyjamas (did you know that the word pyjama comes from India?) and then proceed to a big room with many stations. This is where the processing begins. A dozen assistants are standing in front of the stations, checking you in, sending you on, checking you off and generally directing traffic. They take blood, do a chest x-ray, examine you stomach (barium), mammogram, pap smear, eye check, weight and height, etc. And you're out in a couple of hours.

It feels a bit inhumane to be roaming around in your pyjamas with 50 or so other people, but it's so very efficient. Like fish swimming.